Page 1 of Zenith Court

1

Astra

The nail went in on the third strike, two more than Caspian would have needed and one fewer than I’d needed yesterday. I set the next one against the rail and lined the hammer up. Behind me, the farmhouse chimney sent its smoke straight into the still morning air.

Five weeks since the decree. Five weeks of learning what building required, which was more than I’d understood the word to mean at dawn that first morning, with the proclamation still creased in Cosima’s hand. Building meant a cellar inventoried down to the last jar of pickled beets. It meant watch rotations written in Caspian’s hand and revised in Rev’s, because Rev knew things about staying awake that no Ascendant education covered. It meant a second fence line thrown up along the orchard side not because a fence would stop anyone but because a fence made a man dismount, and a man dismounting was a man announcing himself. It meant bread in quantities that had made Kieran call the kitchen a garrison bakery.

It also meant the road. The road meant riders.

They came through the valley twice a week now, sometimes three times, gray-coated men moving in pairs with the Council’s seal on their saddlebags and the decree’s three orders in their mouths: locate, contain, or neutralize. They didn’t turn up the farm track. Months ago, a man whose whole life was arranging where other people looked had made the track easy to miss, and so far his work held. But I’d learned the sound of Council horses the second week—shod heavier than farm stock, ridden by men who kept parade spacing even in the middle of nowhere—and my hands had learned to keep working while the sound passed below us, hammer steady, head down.

I finished the rail and didn’t start the next one. The trough stood at the fence corner, fed by a channel Jonah had cut from the spring in our first week, and the water in it lay flat and bright as a basin.

That was the thing about water now. All of it looked like a basin to me.

I pulled off my gloves and touched the inside of my coat, where the wren sat pinned against the lining. Old habit gone new again—my mother’s brooch riding over my heart while I tried to do the thing that had gotten her killed. Then I put both hands on the trough’s rim and reached down past my own three lines to the place the current lived, the way I’d practiced every morning for five weeks.

Nothing came.

Resistance would have been something to work against. This was a pump handle moving easily because the pipe beneath it stood empty. In Kieran’s cell the current had poured through me hard enough to blow the edges off my vision. In the Tower’s lower corridors it had put the head of Tower security on the stone without my aiming it at anything at all. Now I reached for it every morning over a water trough and found nothing.

The trough was where I practiced because the yard gave everyone room to stand clear. Seven people slept under the farmhouse roof, and I still did not know whether the current could distinguish a threat from the body nearest me. Until I could call it and stop it, I would not test that question indoors.

Delphine said she could feel it gathering, some days, in the moment before I tried. She never said what she felt it do after. That morning, the silence after the failed reach lasted only a few seconds. Hoofbeats carried up from the valley road.

I had the hammer back in my hand before I’d decided to reach for it, body making its old arrangements without consulting me. Two horses, heavy-shod, parade-spaced. I kept my head down and set the nail and listened to them come level with the bottom of the track, and that was when the current arrived — uninvited, unhelpful, flooding up through my three lines until my wrist burned with it and my mouth tasted like a coin. The trough water shivered. Nothing had touched it.

Survive, said the underside of a table a mountain and a war away.

The riders passed. The current drained back down to wherever it lived when I wanted it, and left me standing at a fence with a burning wrist and a hammer gripped hard enough to ache, exactly as armed as any other furious woman in a field.

“Nothing when I call,” I told the trough. “All of it when I don’t.”

The trough held its water and its opinion. I drove the nail in two strikes and called it a morning.

The afternoon passed in chores and watching the road. No rider turned up the track. By dark, the ache of the hammer had settled into my palm, and the current had gone quiet again.

Dinner was bread and the last of the smoked fish and a pot of beans Rev had improved past recognition. We ate it as we’d learned to eat everything—seven people around a table built for six, the lamp turned low enough that the windows gave nothing to the road.

“I’m just saying the goat doesn’t like me, specifically.” Kieran had his chair tipped back on two legs, a heel of bread in one hand, gesturing with it. “Every morning. I bring the feed, I bring my best material, and she looks at me like I’m trying to sell her something.”

“She looks at everyone that way,” Delphine said.

Kieran let the chair drop level. “That’s worse. I bring her breakfast.” He tore off a piece of bread. “Nobody sells the goat. But I reserve the right to complain about her.”

“Noted,” Cosima said, not looking up. She had the watch ledger open beside her plate, her fork in one hand and a pencil in the other, and she was doing what she did every evening, which was making our survival look like bookkeeping. “Roads were quiet past the mill. Two gray pairs on the valley road before noon, none after. Juno’s last letter says the Hall’s east kitchen is feeding more people than the Hall’s rolls can account for, which she reports as a supply discrepancy.” A small pause, the pencil moving. “She’s proud of that. You can tell.”

Caspian answered her in numbers, because that was their arrangement: watches, feed, and the math of how long seven people who knew nothing about farming could hold a farm. I let the sound of it move around me and did the thing I did at that table every night without meaning to: read the room through my wrist. Three lines, three low fires banked to embers, and under the bread and lamp-oil the chord of them—cold marble and burnt sugar, green apple and sun on warm stone, leather and the skin under a rolled sleeve. Two months ago I’d have needed water to read anything. Now the reading never stopped.

Jonah lifted his head.

His eyes went to the east window and stayed. The table went quiet. His Mark showed below his rolled cuff, burnt copper and unhidden. Five weeks after he had stopped concealing it, he still sometimes looked at his forearm as if it belonged to a man he was pleased to be meeting.

“Rider,” he said. “One horse. Light-shod.”

Then I heard it too, and I counted without deciding to — hoofbeats, the gait of an animal being managed rather than spent. One rider. Walking his horse up our track in the dark.

We moved as we’d drilled it. Rev to the cellar door with the documents—her word for everything that could hang us. Delphine to the corner, her back against the wall and the rest of her in shadow. Kieran to the porch post, taking the air. Caspian beside me at the door with the lamp, because the two of us in lamplight looked like a farm couple, and Jonah nowhere at all, which meant he was exactly where he intended to be.